DEEP CRIMSON (1996)
"We are united in blood."
3 out of ****
Starring Daniel Giménez Cacho, Regina Orozco, Marisa Paredes, Verónica Merchant Directed by Arturo Ripstein Written by Paz Alicia Garciadiego Cinematography by Guillermo Granillo
American movies are fascinated by the idea of violent lovers on the run. BONNIE AND CLYDE, WILD AT HEART, NATURAL BORN KILLERS: they are repelled by their heartless, cruel anti-heroes, but they are also seduced by them, because underlying their violence is the romantic myth of the outlaw, an American myth if ever there was one. DEEP CRIMSON is a mordant black comedy about a pair of violent lovers on the run, but it is a Mexican movie, and apparently Mexicans are less inclined to to romanticize their outlaws, because what we get is a portrait of homicidal loners rather different from the one we're used to--a portrait that is, I suspect, closer to the truth.
The lovers/loners in DEEP CRIMSON are Coral and Nicolas (Regina Orozco, Daniel Giménez Cacho). She's a pathologically lonely single mother of two children, somewhat overweight but convinced that she is monstrously obese; he's a balding would-be Lothario, convinced that he's a freak because of his baldness, which he conceals with a hairpiece and a fedora. She fantasizes about Charles Boyer (the time is the 1940s) while she reads Lonely Hearts columns in search of eligible men; he romances and then robs lonely women, meeting them via ads in Lonely Hearts columns in which he claims to look like Charles Boyer.
And so, of course, they meet. They have an awkward first encounter; he leaves; he returns and they make love; he robs her and goes home. She, fully aware of his crime, follows him to his home, her children in tow, and demands that he let her live with him. He says he can't have her in his home because he cannot afford to keep two children. She abandons the children, and--it's that kind of a relationship--touched by this act, he acquiesces to her demands: she will be his lover, and his partner in crime, helping him to select his victims.
They attempt to choose rich widows and then divest them of their wealth. Unfortunately, Coral and Nicolas are not particularly good criminals: they manage to kill the widows, because Coral is jealous, but they turn out to not be so wealthy after all. Soon the couple are fleeing from one backwater to another, disposing of the evidence as best they can after each failed scam.
DEEP CRIMSON has no illusions about Coral and Nicolas. They are not young, beautiful, and coolly amoral. There is nothing remotely noble or heroic about their anti-social stance. Their fate is not tragic; it is pathetic. The murders they commit are messy and complicated. And while American movies of this kind usually find the criminals more interesting than their victims (who tend to be rednecks, buffoons, and non-descripts), here each victim has a personality. The final victim (Verónica Merchant), in particular, is shown to be a decent, hardworking, admirable young woman. What Coral and Nicolas do to her is unforgivable; what they do right after that is even worse.
The film would be relentlessly bleak if it didn't have such a wicked sense of humour. During their initial 'date,' when Nicolas notices a picture of Coral's children on the wall, he remarks that she failed to mention them in her ad. Oh, she says, "it's just that they're so well-behaved that sometimes I forget they exist." Indeed. And in what may be the best scene, the murder of the couple's second victim (Marisa Paredes), an act of sudden and appalling brutality becomes laugh-out-loud funny because of the choice of murder weapon and the way in which its staged.
Arturo Ripstein directs the film with verve, although scenes do tend to drag on too long. The camera lingers on each setting, giving us plenty of time to take in every detail; the movie is seduced by its own production design. Granted, the production design is terrific--be it a desolate exterior shot of brown, sere grassland or a cluttered interior shot of a widow's homely parlour where, inevitably, a figurine of the Virgin Mary stares down from the mantelpiece--but the pacing could have been faster, if only to direct our attention away from the realization that, despite the fresh approach, the story itself is nothing new (quite literally, since it's based on a true story previously filmed as THE HONEYMOON KILLERS). There's a fine line between inevitability and predictability, and the plot of DEEP CRIMSON stays on the right side of that line, but only just.
Happily, aside from its morbid wit, the movie brings a great deal of insight to the story. It understands that the Bonnies and Clydes of the world are few and far between, and murder is usually committed by desperate, lonely, confused people who probably never thought they were capable of killing, but one day they were pushed over the edge by factors that remain incomprehensible to them, by some insignificant event, and there was no turning back. And then, if they're like Coral and Nicolas, they cling to whomever they can for as long as they can, and pray that someone, somewhere, will forgive them, although they know it's not bloody likely.
A Review by David Dalgleish (September 30/98)
dgd@intouch.bc.ca
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